Page 13 of Finding Her Billionaire Cowboy Mismatch

She found Hollis, the Hickory Hollow lead, pulling tools off the tailgate.

“Got marching orders for us?” he asked.

“Better. Got a map.” She handed him the page. “South break’s ours, the one by the leaning cottonwood. Bolton takes the two upstream. Wire’s staged at the gate so nobody’s hauling spools through the water.”

Hollis ran his eyes down it, brows climbing. “Annie’s got you doing this now?”

“Apparently I’m broadening my horizons.”

“Huh.” He pocketed the map. “Beats the way Bill used to bark it at us. This I can follow.” He whistled his men toward the south break and left her at the tailgate with nothing left to manage.

Hollis was a good hand, twenty years on the place, and he didn’t need her running his break for him. None of them did. The plan was the help. Once it was in his hand, her job was finished and her usefulness with it, which was the part of coordinating nobody warned a woman about. You built the thing, you handed it off, and then you stood at the edge of the work you’d ordered with your hands gone empty.

Which freed her up for the thing she had no business doing.

She lingered.

She told herself a good coordinator stayed till the work took shape, that she was making sure the plan held. It was a thin lie, and she half believed it.

Across the creek, the Bolton crew had their stretch well in hand, and at the center of it, saying little, stood Stephen Garrett.

She’d had him filed wrong. The truth of it settled over her, there in the mesquite shade with her arms crossed.

At the barbecue she’d read his quiet as empty, a man with nothing upstairs and less to say. From here it read different.

He wasn’t slow. He was deliberate. He set each post and checked it true before he moved on, every motion carrying its reason, none of it spent for nothing. The men around him fell into his rhythm without a word passing.

He never raised his voice, never pointed twice. A tilt of his head sent a man for the stretcher. A flat hand held another off a section not ready for him. He ran a crew the way she ran an office, by staying three steps ahead and making the whole of it look effortless.

One post in the south stretch fought him, the hole gone to gumbo from the creek. A younger man would have forced it, or cussed it. Stephen knelt, worked the muck out with his hands, and set the post by hand and eye, standing it true while the boy beside him still reached for the bar. No fuss, no show, the job done right the once.

When he did speak, it landed. A word to the youngest hand, and the boy fixed his grip. A nod to another, and the two of them lifted a roll of wire in time. He chose his words the way a careful man counts coins, and spent every one on purpose.

The youngest hand put her in mind of herself at that age, all eagerness and no patience, forever three moves ahead of his own hands. Stephen never shamed him for it. He’d step in, reset the boy’s grip, and step out again, and the lesson landed without a single hard word. She’d had bosses who taught by humiliation and bosses who taught by example, and she’d have crawled over glass for the second kind.

His voice carried across the creek now and again, too low for the words but easy in its weight, and once whatever he said set the whole crew laughing, the youngest hand loudest of them all. A man the men laughed with, not at. She filed that away too.

That was the thing she’d missed at the barbecue. Not empty. Economical. The man didn’t waste motion or breath, and the not-wasting was a competence all its own, the kind she’d spent her whole life building and almost nobody bothered to credit.

And then there was the rest of him.

He’d shed his outer shirt in the heat, down to a plain tee gone dark at the spine, and when he hauled a run of wire taut, the muscle along his shoulders and arms pulled and corded with the work.

Elise’s mouth went dry.

She looked away, on principle, and looked back inside of five seconds.

Well. That’s unfortunate.

There was no honest word for the warmth climbing her neck but the plain one, and Elise prided herself on honesty.

She had a crush. On Stephen Garrett. The full, ridiculous, note-passing article. At her age. Over a cowboy. The kind of crush that made a grown woman reckless, the kind she’d outlawed by ordinance years ago.

The admission near made her laugh. She’d spent a whole supper deciding the man was a dud, and here she stood a week later, gone soft over the flex of his shoulders and the way he gentled a green colt of a ranch hand without lifting his voice. In her defense, he was easy to look at and easier to respect, and a woman would have to be embalmed to miss the pull of the pair together.

It wasn’t a crime to look. She told herself so, firmly, in the voice she used on panicking brides. Looking was free, and it didn’t cost a soul a thing. It was the wanting that ran up a tab, and she’d settled that tab once already, in full, with interest.

So why wouldn’t she. He was capable and kind in that gruff, sideways way that never once asked thanks for it.